Did You Know...

On Wednesday, Georgia Rep. Hank Johnson was a man in search of a metaphor to describe the Democrats’ battle against Michigan’s Right to Work law. And when Hank Johnson’s in search of a metaphor, something’s about to go wrong:

“I was thinking to myself earlier today, what happens when you put in a cage fight a giant with a midget?” Johnson said then. “Well, the midget will not win the fight. I’m going to tell you that. Why? He just doesn’t carry enough weight to do so. But if you put 30 midgets in with that giant, then the midgets have a chance.”

The next day, Johnson again took to the House floor to explain that he used the word “midget” only because he’d never heard the word before, or something like that:

“I had never heard of the m word … it’s a word also that describes a group of people and it, at one time, has been commonly used as a descriptive term,” Johnson said Thursday afternoon. “But to my discovery, just within the last 12 hours or so, I have found that the use of the ‘midget’ — oh, excuse me, the use of the m word — is no longer socially acceptable.”

Johnson never heard of “the m word,” and obviously he never heard of The First Rule of Holes either:

Johnson then explained that the “m word” referred to a medical condition called dwarfism, though he expressed his preference for the term “abnormally small people” rather than dwarfism.